Wednesday, April 30, 2014

LAST WEEKEND

LAST
WEEKEND, directed by Tom Dolby and Tom Williams from a screenplay by Mr. Dolby,
will have its world premiere on May 2nd at the San Francisco
International Film Festival. It tells the tale of a mother (played stunningly
by Patricia Clarkson) who, in the course of an eventful Labor Day weekend,
comes to terms with the fact that she no longer plays a central role in the
lives of her grown sons. I’m proud to
have been the film’s supervising editor.

At
my first meeting with Tom and Tom -- my job interview -- the directors said the
tone of the piece was meant to be Chekhovian. Specifically, Tom Dolby’s story
about a gathering of kith and kin at a family estate soon to go on the selling
block evoked The Cherry Orchard.On the title page of Anton Chekhov’s text,
the playwright tells us his piece is “A Comedy in Four Acts.”Famously, Stanislavski directed its first
production, at the Moscow Art Theatre, as a tragedy.The challenge in editing, then, would be to
keep both humor and pathos alive while still endowing LAST WEEKEND with a
stylistic and emotional unity.

And indeed, the narrative unfolds with a
comfortable mixture of comedy and drama.Combining levity and gravitas, of course, heightens an audience’s
experience of each.I was reminded of
this artful dynamica few months ago after a
screening of Brian Percival’s THE BOOK THIEF.Lead actor Geoffrey Rush arrived at the end of the movie for a question
and answer session and asked, “Did we get the laughs?”While that might seem like an odd query about
a sad story set in Nazi Germany, it was an important one for Mr. Rush.“If we don’t get the laughs,” he explained,
“we don’t maximize the tears.”He’s
right; emotional extremes keep the viewer’s guard down.

The Toms, as cast and crew came to call
them, understood this from the start.So
my interview became a work session.The
directors’ vision -- the one to which an editor tries to remain true as a picture
evolves -- was laid out. Comedy and drama were to play equal roles as LAST
WEEKEND’s story unfolded; to succeed, the film had to maintain a delicate tonal
balance.

It may surprise non-editors to learn that
thematic and emotional values are what directors and editors talk about from
the get-go.But really, what else is
there to discuss?Nothing has been shot,
so cutting rhythms and patterns are random abstractions at this point.

There’s no reason for an editor talk to a
director about the software she or he will use at a first meeting… or
ever.No matter how exciting editing
students might find such a chat, discussing Avid or Adobe with a contemporary director would be as
meaningless as telling Hawks, Hitchcock or Wilder what kind of splicer
the cutter might use.

So, the screenplay is the focal point of
the job interview.The director’s
interpretation is paramount, to be sure, but the editor’s impressions are also quite important.And Tom and Tom wanted to hear about mine.I could see the Chekhovian nature of the
writing, I told them.But it also
evoked, for me, the feel of George Cukor’s THE PHILADELPHIA STORY.In that film, Jimmy Stewart’s character,
Macaulay Conner, says more than once, “With the rich and mighty, always a
little patience!”

It’s not that Tom Dolby’s script defends
oligarchy; it absolutely doesn’t. But
the film does show affluent characters to be multi-dimensional and deeply
human. And yet, unlike most contemporary Hollywood movies, LAST WEEKEND refuses
to shy away from dialogue about socio-economic class. In one amusing scene, the
family patriarch (Chris Mulkey) boasts that he’s not nouveau riche as are his “dot-com-er” neighbors. After all, you
see, his fortune (from a chain of workout gyms) is over two decades old!

I guess the Toms were comfortable with my
impressions and with the extent to which I understood and embraced their vision,
because we did wind up, happily, working together.But there’s also subtext to the initial director/editor
meeting – something beyond agreement about the substance of a script. Since directors and editors spend many
hours a day in the editing suite for months on end, the question, “Is this
someone I can abide in cramped quarters for a protracted period?” lies beneath
the surface.

And the answer has little to do with
whether the editor wears the right perfume or cologne (or none) to a meeting,
or whether she or he likes indie bands, single malt scotches or the Dodgers.
(Those things might come up, as text, to be sure, but they’re relatively
unimportant.)Potential compatibility in
the cutting room is really determined by how prepared the editor seems to be,
how eager she or he is to hear what the directors have to say and by the
quality of ideas she or he brings to the table.

What’s more, it’s imperative that those
ideas relate to the directors’ vision.If I had suggested Tom and Tom that LAST WEEKEND needed additional one
liners to become more of a broad comedy I might have had a point, but not one
related to the Chekhovian film about families they set out to make and that,
together with my co-editor David Grey and the whole cast and crew, we succeeded
in making.

Recalling the successful meeting with the
Toms, along with the lessons one can learn from it, somehow makes me think of my very
first interview for an editing position – the exact opposite of my LAST WEEKEND
experience. The word “disaster” comes to mind. At the time I was just
graduating from assisting other cutters, and had a couple of editing credits on
“afterschool specials” under my belt.

I'd read Ralph Rosenblum’s anecdotal
feast, When The Shooting Stops (The
Cutting Begins) and found it inspiring in all the wrong ways.Don’t get me wrong.There’s much for filmmakers to glean from the
book -- indeed, Tom Dolby read and enjoyed it while we were editing LAST
WEEKEND –- but the author’s tone suggests that he singlehandedly “saved” almost
every picture on which he worked, including Woody Allen’s TAKE THE MONEY AND
RUN, ANNIE HALL and INTERIORS. Mr. Rosenblum's stories left
me with the impression that the trait directors admired most in an editor was
ruthless critical objectivity.

So I took the room by storm. I was smug,
superior and didactic – a real charmer -- telling the writer/director about all
the things, real and imagined, that were wrong with her screenplay.Her jaw and those of the producers dropped.They were speechless.As the silence became awkward and painful, I simply
filled it with more hot air, continuing to insult an artist who has since
received critical acclaim for her New Yorker short stories and other fiction. Not
my shining moment!

Indeed, I’ve come a long way. When
recommending When the Shooting Stops to Tom Dolby I did so with a caveat about
its tone. I’ve long known that the most important contribution an editor can make to a film is to help
shape it into the best version of what the directors envisioned in the first
place.And I’m confident that we did
that with LAST WEEKEND.

About Me

Michael R. Miller has had a dream career in film editing. After graduating from Cornell
University, he landed the plum job of assistant editor on Woody Allen’s MANHATTAN. He worked in the same capacity on Mr. Allen’s STARDUST MEMORIES and on Martin Scorcese’s RAGING BULL. Subsequently Mr. Miller became a sound editor on Joel and Ethan Coen’s BLOOD SIMPLE, and went on to collaborate with "the boys" as picture editor of RAISING ARIZONA and
MILLER’S CROSSING. His many other cutting credits include Terry Zwygoff’s GHOST WORLD, Herbert Ross’ BOYS ON THE SIDE, Thomas Carter’s SWING KIDS, Rocky Morton and Annablel Jankel’s D.O.A., Keenan Wayans’ I’M GONNA GIT U, SUCKA,
Paul Dinello’s STRANGERS WITH CANDY, Michael Bay’s ARMAGEDDON, Rupert
Wainwright’s STIGMATA and Anthony Hopkins’ SLIPSTREAM. He also edited Josh Radnor’s HAPPYTHANKYOUMOREPLEASE, winner of the 2010 Sundance Film
Festival Audience Award, Mr. Radnor's well-reviewed LIBERAL ARTS, which premiered at Sundance in 2012, and Maya Forbes' INFINITELY POLAR BEAR, which also premiered at Sundance. He is currently a film professor at University of North Carolina School of the Arts.